教學方

Ramon Diaz-Bernardo

Associate Professor

腳本

So far, we have seen the basic elements of marketing research. Today, we are going to cover the different stages of the marketing research process. The first stage of the marketing research process is the formulation of the problem. Of course, in an organization, a manager has certain decision problems. So he encounters the problem and then refers that problem to a market research company, maybe within the company or outside the company. Once this formulation of the problem stage is done, the next stage is determining the research design, what kind of research you are going to do? The first option for marketing research is called exploratory research. Under exploratory research, you use usually secondary data, that is a data from other companies and get some quantitative conclusions. The second type of research design is called descriptive research. Here, usually you use primary data and more or less always, you'll use some quantitative methodologies to analyze the data. The third stage or other third type of marketing research methodology is called causal research. This is where again, you use primary data and use a quantitative methodology to analyze the data. We are going to look deeper into these three different types of marketing research designs in the next videos. Rather, let's go to the next stage of the marketing decision process, which is called the designing of the data collection method and the different forms of data collection. Of this, the first one is usually observational or survey method. That's where you ask potential consumers different questions based on their opinions and their preferences, and that's how you get some idea of what the consumers are wanting. The second type of design is usually open-ended or closed-ended. Now here in the open-ended case, you are not given the consumers or the potential survey respondents any options, but rather they express their opinions just from their own mind, and then you actually decipher that information from the text. Otherwise, if it's closed ended, then you have certain options which are given to the potential respondents and based on that, you draw your conclusions. The fourth stage of the marketing research process is called designing sample and collection of data. Now, when you are doing this stage, you have to remember three basic elements. First of all, who are the people you are going to talk to? That's very important because your sample should be representative. Why? Because unless the sample is representative, you cannot just draw your conclusions or any meaningful conclusions because your actual consumers doesn't reflect in the sample you're talking to. The next important element to remember is the reliability of the sample. What do we mean by reliability? Is the sample actually giving you suggestions or responses which are logical or which makes sense in the overall context of your research problem. Once you know that your sample is reliable, the next important thing is to go for validity. That is, do you have enough sample points which can give you meaningful conclusions. If you have too few people responding to your questions, then all your conclusions are going to be biased because they do not represent the total population you are looking at. The next stage of the marketing decision process or marketing research decision process is analyzing the data and interpreting the data. There are two kind of analysis you can do, first one is basic analysis. Of course here, the analysis is done at a more fundamental level, may be you do some descriptive analysis or maybe do some correlation analysis, where the results are not very detailed, but gives you some idea of what you are expecting. The second type of analysis is more advanced. That's where you go in-depth, use certain models, may be statistical models or econometric models, which gives you much more insightful result. The final stage of the marketing decision process is reporting of the results. Of course, all the analysis you have done is not of any value, unless you summarize the research results properly and draw conclusions. Remember, you always have to make certain recommendations based on the conclusions you have drawn, because remember, in the first stage, we talked about that a marketing manager gives you certain decision problems from which you formulate the research problems. So unless you provide back the recommendations which are meaningful, the entire marketing research design is not worthwhile to consider. So that's why it's important to consider all the six stages of the marketing research process. In the next video, we're going to be exploring in depth the three different approaches to marketing research which are causal research, descriptive research, and exploratory research.